Thoughts for Beyond the Deepwater Horizon

Submitted by pneill on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 11:27

Looking forward beyond Deepwater Horizon, consider these thoughts:

“The conclusions are inescapable: during the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical, and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates, and over larger spatial scales that ever recorded on Earth. Humans have unwittingly embarked upon a grand experiment with our planet. The outcome of this experiment is unknown, but has profound implications for all life…”

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, beauty, and stability of the biotic community.”

Aldo Leopold (Sand County Almanac, 1947)

“Environmental challenges threaten the ascendant pro-market, anti-government ideology. They require major governmental responses, including action at the international level. They require ‘interference’ with the market to ensure that social and environmental goals are served. And they require rethinking the utopian materialism that puts a premium only on unlimited economic expansion.”

James Gustave Speth (Red Sky at Morning, 2004)
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University

“For the sea lies all about us. The commerce of all lands must cross it. The very winds that move over the lands have been cradled on its broad expanse and seek ever to return to it. The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land. So the rains that rose from it return again in rivers. In the mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives, in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea – to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and end.”